It is also thanks to the Bolognese expertise and components for superconducting magnets from OCEM Power Electronics that it was possible to turn on the JT-60SA tokamak, the experimental nuclear fusion reactor, which after more than a decade of work was launched last Dec. 1 in Naka, Japan. The facility produced its first plasma last Oct. 23, making it the largest working superconductive tokamak in the world. This is a historic achievement for the scientific community and international industry, as well as a success for Italy, which participated in the project with research organizations (Enea, CNR, RFX Consortium) and several companies including OCEM Power Electronics.
The JT-60SA tokamak is the result of the scientific collaboration -formalized in the “Broader approach” program – between Europe, with the Fusion for energy (F4E) agency, and Japan, with the National Institutes for Quantum science and Technology (QST), with more than 50 companies and 500 scientists working together, cost a total of 560 million euros, and now paves the way for ITER, the giant experimental fusion machine installed in the south of France, the result of an international partnership. And, in prospect, for DEMO, the next step of fusion reactor planned by the European consortium Eurofusion. Both projects on which OCEM PE is also actively working.
<A success for Italy, which has provided scientific support and tokamak components as a voluntary contribution under the Broader approach agreement, in which the Italian government has committed itself by allocating about 70 million euros funds>, comments Gilberto Pichetto Fratin, minister of the Environment and Energy Security and head of the Italian Fusion Program, on the news of the plasm powering up in the Naka reactor, confirming the possibility of generating safe, stable and clean energy from the fusion of atoms (deuterium and tritium in this case) by recreating the energy that light the sun and stars.
Italian industry, under the coordination of Enea and RFX Consortium, supplied superconducting cables for the magnets, superconducting coils of the toroidal magnets, coil containment cases, and power systems to power and protect the magnets that make up JT-60SA: the machine, six stories high, includes a doughnut-shaped “tokamak” vessels set to contain a swirling plasma heated to 200 million degrees Celsius. OCEM Power Electronics, in particular, supplied the Switching Network Units for the central solenoid magnets; it also provides technical support on the magnet power and protection systems complex through its ongoing contract with F4E.
<The JT-60SA facility is critical to the fusion roadmap because it gives our experts a unique opportunity to learn, use this device and share this knowledge with the ITER international experimental reactor and decide the contribution of fusion in a carbon-free energy mix>, explains Marc Lachaise, director of F4E (Fusion for Energy).
Crespellano, 11 December 2023